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NYU Offers Full-Tuition Scholarships for All Medical Students (wsj.com)
New York University said Thursday that it will cover tuition for all its medical students regardless of their financial situation, a first among the nation's major medical schools and an attempt to expand career options for graduates who won't be saddled with six-figure debt [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled]. From a report: School officials worry that rising tuition and soaring loan balances are pushing new doctors into high-paying fields and contributing to a shortage of researchers and primary care physicians. Medical schools nationwide have been conducting aggressive fundraising campaigns to compete for top prospects, alleviate the debt burden and give graduates more career choices. NYU raised more than $450 million of the roughly $600 million it estimates it will need to fund the tuition package in perpetuity, including $100 million from Home Depot founder Kenneth Langone and his wife, Elaine. The school will provide full-tuition scholarships for 92 first-year students -- another 10 are already covered through M.D./PhD programs -- as well as 350 students already partway through the M.D.-only degree program.
We need more home grown doctors. I don't know about the rest of /. but I'm getting older. Right now we've been able to poach doctors from poorer countries but those countries are modernizing so that's not going to last forever.
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Is this really the best way to spend the generous donations of your alumni? Surely there is a better way to spend this money, like a lazy river in an event center.
You don't need a government program to fix everything, private donations and effort can actually work to fix problems like the rising cost of tuition.
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Wouldn't it be better to treat the illness instead of the symptoms? In this case, the illness is the cancerous way in which administrative burden has skyrocketed without end. The symptom is the high tuitions.
NYU should expect a greater quality of med school students. Similarly to when Georgia offered the hope scholarship for students which can dramatically reduce the cost of a college degree.
The 2 top level schools in Georgia have both gotten better and better students.
To fund students doing real degrees.
I would be very interested in seeing the books on this program after a few years. The school realized it would not take much fundraising to cover their costs of educating the students. Note they do not have to cover the tuition they charge students; only their costs.
These days since colleges and universities have turned into money printing machines instead of educational entities, the difference between tuition and how much it actually costs the schools is so large they determined let's raise the money to cover our costs and live off the PR of providing free tuition. They have basically admitted the difference between the two amounts of money is ridiculous in this day and age.
Use that money to lower the cost of tuition for EVERYONE, maybe it won't be free, but if you lower the cost, then everyone can benefit. Also, perhaps they could put part of the money into research (and implementation) on how they can make their operations more efficient so that they don't have to charge such huge tuitions.
That's a first.
Higher education costs are increasing at rates much higher than inflation and wage growth. My pet blame target is the expense of suit-weasel administrators who don't do anything but make rules for other people. Now, when it comes to doctors, is someone really going to to defend one of the highest paid professions in the country from high education costs?
Personally, after their repeated failures to help my wife, me, and everyone I know with just about everything they've ever gone to see a fucking worthless doctor for, I couldn't give a shit less if doctors were debt bonded slaves chained to the ER wheelchair handrails and beaten by the nursing staff twice a day to remember what criminal failures they are, but hey that's just me. When antibiotics quit working (and we are well on our way) because doctors won't say no to mommy who wants to leave with an amoxicillin prescription for junior's hand cramps, about the only thing they can help you with is to set a broken bone. Everything else they do will either kill you, maim you, give you a worse health problem, addict you to opioids or benzos and/or completely bankrupt you. I'm not going to their filthy MRSA-filled office or hospital unless I get shot or break a bone (maybe). Remind me again who the fuck is supposed to cry for these people and why? I got a whole long list of people to feel a helluva lot sorrier for.
This is just code for "we get to pick who can afford to go to college" and is not systematic in the slightest.
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"Do you want more doctors?
Because that's how you get more doctors."
This way someone can become a doctor and take a not-as-well-paying position in under-served areas or research.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
No more 4 years of undergrad bullsh!t to get into medical school to get a medical degree. There, medical school costs cut by 1/3.
Degree inflation, it matters.
Pharmacy double the cost from previous 4 to now 8 years
Physical Therapy from 4 to now 8 years
Nursing from 2 to now 5 years
That's good news for medical students who, as doctors, easily earn well over 6 figure salaries. However, it does nothing for good students wanting to become teachers who, while they generally have less debt, have far lower 5/maybe 6-figure salaries. The UK, which recently tripled student tuition to 9,000 pounds/year (~$15,000 Canadian) is suddenly finding that it is really hard to recruit science teachers. With a science degree and a large debt teaching becomes far less attractive compared to industry. Without good science teachers, you may miss out on getting good students into science-related disciplines like medicine before they even get to university.
We need more home grown doctors. I don't know about the rest of /. but I'm getting older. Right now we've been able to poach doctors from poorer countries but those countries are modernizing so that's not going to last forever.
We are facing a shortage of doctors, but training more doctors is unlikely to be the best answer to the problem. We need to offload work currently done by doctors to other staff who don't need as much training. I doubt it takes 6 years of post-bachelor training to diagnose a toddler's ear infection. It won't be easy to make such a transition in our medical industry, but it may be less painful than medical costs increasing 5%+ higher than inflation every year.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Make the doctor they educated to 'donate' 1% of their income back to the faculty.
Suddenly I dont care.
But Caribbean is a lot better then the high cost of living in hollywood
I think this is a good move, more more more doctors, BUT on condition of the loan they should be required to work for the state or someone at a reasonable wage for x years. Find the people with passion for helping others and not the others who just want prestige, ego and who make it feel like you serfs are just interrupting their tee times. Bring pressure to lower doctors wages, fuck even offer this deal to existing doctors in forms of loan relief. Next attack the parasites of insurance who want everything to be unaffordable so that you require them. We must Bring sanity back to the system! All of our lives are literally at stake.
We need more home grown doctors. I don't know about the rest of /. but I'm getting older. Right now we've been able to poach doctors from poorer countries but those countries are modernizing so that's not going to last forever.
I think there's a larger point here that people are missing.
The school is putting aside enough money to fund the scholarships in perpetuity.
If you have enough wealth gathered in one spot, you can use it to fund things forever. We could gradually extend this model to cover other universities and other disciplines, and eventually reach the point where all university education is funded this way.
(Would require a *lot* of invested money - probably more than the current GDP - but we could do it incrementally over time; say, over the next 100 years.)
The model could also be extended to other societal benefits. Hypothetically, the return from $2 million in an investment account can keep pace with inflation (roughly 2%) as well as provide an income for one family: varies depending on assumptions, but a 5% return minus 2% inflation would yield $60,000 in perpetuity.
This could be the way to get UBI and universal health care: start putting away chunks of wealth to be used for funding projects in perpetuity.
It neatly side-steps the counter argument "eventually you run out of other people' money".
in the 70's medical students used bankruptcy to get there loans wiped out.
So why are doing stuff that they really do not need at the cost of others who own 50K+ and have little hope working Starbucks to pay it off?
what about cutting down pre med time?
What about 2 years general study's or some pre med AA/AS? and then med school with the BS/BA stuff mixed in?
we've got a big problem with getting Primary Care Physicians. They don't earn a lot, especially if they've got their own practice. A big part of that it our crap insurance system that fights against paying them every step of the way, but given our political environment switching to a single payer system isn't going to happen any time soon. That's left a lot of them unable to pay their crazy high student loans. Which in turn means doctor shortages, especially in rural communities
That's where importing doctors comes in. They're trained overseas where education is usually paid for by tax dollars. That's made up for a lot of the supply issues. We could fix those issues with better pay but given our insurance system that's not an option. So if we take away those imports and we don't fix the pay problems we're going to have massive shortages.
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they also have trades / apprenticeship Germany is good and it's not college for all.
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We do, but doctors should be making enough money to pay their student loans.
They should but you hugely overestimate how much money certain specialties like family practice make - not to mention the number of hours they work. Specialists can do much better of course but it's still hard to start off with several hundred thousand in debt (medical school plus undergrad typically) at the beginning of your career. Plus residencies can take 3-8 years and they only get paid something like $40K per year while a resident.
What about the other students that are going into areas that don't pay as well, but are also essential?
A fair question. We used to do this by adequately funding state schools. But people of a certain political persuasion in the US don't like that for ideological/political reasons so the funding has languished and debt has been piled on young people when they are least able to deal with it so that others can get tax cuts they don't really need. Of course even some private schools really don't need to charge what they do. Harvard has a $36 billion endowment so every student who goes there could go there for free if Harvard chose to do that.
Why should they be subsidizing people going into such high paying professions?
A lot of graduate schools are highly subsidized. I got a scholarship to grad school. But pragmatically because we need more of them. Because the job is important. Because that school can do it. The question should be why are we not doing it for more professions rather than why this profession in particular. What you should be asking is which important profession can we help out next.
You don't need a government program to fix everything, private donations and effort can actually work to fix problems like the rising cost of tuition.
So instead of a government program with some measure of accountability, you prefer hand outs from wealthy donors with no accountability? Nothing wrong with private donations but depending on fickle handouts from rich people who may have ulterior motives isn't a very sensible way to run a society.
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The same article is available in Fox News http://www.foxnews.com/health/...
Notice how they're not lowering the tuition, but providing scholarships. The two things have completely different affects on the finances of the school and with scholarships they can lock the students into requirements for scholarship approval. If they really cared, they'd lower tuition to zero instead of adding the overhead of a scholarship.
Reminds me of my school: RIT. Each year they'd email everyone saying we're increasing tuition in order to increase scholarships and aid so that your costs would go down (of course they always went up).
Then gender studies would be a free degree, if I understand the logic that started this thread. Seems fair.
Except Germany's extremely biased and social class enforcing stratification starting in early education fails to produce the kind of highly skilled workers that the modern economy demands. Germany is experiencing a shortage of workers with the complex skills gained in tertiary education. Specifically "managers, researchers, engineers, doctors, nurses and medical assistants".
Being bracketed into the "easy" path dooms students to failure in the rest of their academic careers. Despite efforts to expand access, drop out rates are increasing especially for those previously bracketed onto lower paths, and total time until graduation is increasing for those who do finish. This is while the same high skill jobs go unfilled.
For the US though, the reality is that making college free in the US would be cheaper for the federal government than its current programs.
I mean it's great it will help people who wouldn't have the mean to become doctors to become one, but at the same time.... Doctors dont need more money they already do a butt load of money when they graduate...
I see this as it will cost less for the already rich people....
I dont see anything wrong with doctor finishing school with huge debt they will have the mean to expuge that debt when they graduate.
I would much prefer they pay the tuition for nurses as they have a small salary and we always need good nurses.
IMHO its a good idea applied at the wrong place.
There are combined 6 and 7 year programs that get students a medical degree out of high school in the US. Incidentally, this is the way most of the world outside of the US does things -- medicine is a 6-year university degree out of high school.
The problem is that the admission process in the US is too competitive in the wrong ways. They focus too much on extracurriculars, seeing an applicant as a "whole person", volunteering for religious groups, etc. Whereas in France, anyone can get in, and as long as they do well on their 2nd-year exams, they're allowed to continue. Base it on the ability to do science and understand it, not "soft" criteria.
we pay a _lot_ for specialists, but when it comes to PCPs by the time your done fighting it out with our insurance system you're pretty broke. My kid's PCP shut down their practice about a year ago because they just plain couldn't get paid. Not sure whatever happened to him either.
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Let's pay the tuition of a bunch of students who are ALREADY PLANNING ON BECOMING DOCTORS. That's sure to increase the number of doctors willing to accept reduced pay as general practitioners or researchers. I'm sure doctors are avoiding those underpaid, underappreciated positions because they are saddled with debt, not because they desire high-paying, prestigious positions. It can't be because our insanely high tuition has scared everyone away from even considering the profession, creating an ever-shrinking pool of talent. Boy are we smart!
Colleges can charge whatever they want for a gender studies degree. But the student will not be able to borrow as much from the government to get it. Maybe they can find other sources of loans (from the college itself maybe?), negotiate tuition, get a sugar-daddy, whatever. If it's so hard to secure funding, maybe the cost will come down or maybe even go away because it's stupid useless degree only gender studies professors can make any money with. Taxpayers win too because they are no longer subsidizing these big loans with high default rates.
Gender studies majors are maybe 0.1% of the US college student population. Something like this is usually a concentration on a history or poli sci degree, or maybe a double major. And nothing wrong with history or poli sci. If we forget history, don't write about it, don't read about it, and don't view politics through a critical lens, we'll likely trend towards authoritarianism and repeat the mistakes of the past. We need intellectuals to keep our culture honest as well as engineers, doctors, and scientists.
Society looses out on actual thinkers and multi-objective problem solvers though, which is worse than the claimed higher default rates in every measure that matters.
Under the new zeitgeist in the US, thinkers and intellectuals are to be tossed out and dismissed. Same as the USSR and Germany did in the 20s and 30s, except with fewer firing squads (for now).
Then gender studies would be a free degree, if I understand the logic that started this thread. Seems fair.
Really?!? That's great! I already spend hours studying the opposite-sex gender, and now you'll pay for my subscription for PornHub? Cool!!
And if I might be so bold, I'd like to point out some fetish sites.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
There's no denying that specialist MDs are paid highly. They're always in very high demand.
The problem, as the article points out, is that students who want to get into the medical field and can't exactly afford that, end up with massive student loan debt. They'll feel like they must specialize because general practitioners don't earn much compared to the specializations. And then we find ourselves asking: what does "Consult your GP" mean if there are no GPs?
This is an attempt to break that cycle. Maybe other universities (and private donors) will look into this if it turns out to yield more GPs and/or MDs as a whole. Maybe it will get people to question the way tuition is set. I'd say I hope the tuition bubble finally bursts, but that would paint me as too much of an idealist.
I'm from Canada. (Yeah, I know, "too much of an idealist" followed immediately by "Canada"... hold your laughter!) The federal government and a few provinces have a loans and bursaries program to help students with financial difficulties. Tuition is not that high for residents (table for the 2017-2018 school year via Statistics Canada). Yet we, too, have a shortage of family doctors, which are GPs. It's possible that there's another cause for these shortages, but I wouldn't know what that is.
Is there too much to learn if you're a GP that you don't have to concern yourself with if you specialize? MDs are essentially learning on the job 24/7 as they have to keep up with discoveries in their field; since a GP's field is the whole thing, there would be that much more to learn, a lot more stress... for less pay.
Is there internal pressure in the health care system to specialize, once an MD finds an affinity for a part of the body and becomes "that GP who secretly knows a lot about $foo"?
Is it just more prestigious?
Those are all symptoms of a bigger systemic problem.
Debt-bonded slaves are the symptom of a problem with setting tuition. Antibiotics no longer working is, as you correctly point out, the symptom of antibiotic abuse/overuse. (As a side note, bacteriophages [a 7:08 minute video on Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell] are the next attempt at dealing with bacterial infections.) Opioids, like morphine and hydromorphone (Dilaudid), and benzos (I presume things like benzocaine), are indeed addictive painkillers if not properly tapered off; this is known, and nurses are usually told how to manage them. Bacteria-filled hospitals are the symptom of... well, people in hospitals having bacterial infections. This can be managed, too, usually by ventilation, humidity control and regular cleaning. But there may be a perverse incentive here, at least in the US: why would a hospital spend so much on all that, when it can get more money from patients who get infected by the hospital's bacteria?
As for "everything else they do will either kill you, maim you, give
After you graduate, you'll most likely be a "ward of the government" and required to work where THEY tell you to work, until THEY feel you've paid back what it cost to train you. THAT means, you'll be assigned to a slum area, or high crime area.
Oh that's nothing. Uneven access to pre-k in the U.S, especially for the those of lower socio-economic status means that many kids are already falling behind before they even start school. The U.S is nearly at the top of high-school drop-out rates among the developed nations
Sounds great, right: the university will be in charge of the money, paying themselves, so they'll actually try to control costs, and thus things will be efficient.
But in reality, admin costs will still go up, and they'll either cry to the government for more funds or will require incoming sharing from graduates... or probably both.
The UK loans system - where you pay a higher rate of income tax collected by the tax authorities - until you pay off your loan or 30 years have elapsed since graduation, when it disappears, is a better model here; if the doctors do well, they repay the loan rather than merely being subsidised permanently. If they choose a low paying medical career, they don't.
As a result, the cost of medical education will increase to absorb the subsidy, and more failed candidates will be tricked into attempting the road to being a doctor. It's not like doctoring is a poorly paying field. What's next, free tuition for investment bankers?
Those honest intellectuals came up with the idea for the Iraq War.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
100% of kids can't go to college. Recognizing that and dealing with it is a great strength. We used to have vocational education in high school before it was gutted a decade or 2 ago.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
And nothing wrong with history or poli sci
Depends on first principles, you can produce "intellectuals" who believe anything. If a history department includes "gender studies" it's compromised, same as if the physics department offered a minor in astrology.
It's never lupus.
the shortage of qualified medical professionals is one of the inputs into the cost of medical care --- which, in case some of you haven't noticed,
has become ridiculously high.
My wife is a doctor so I have some direct insight into this. I won't deny that it likely plays some role but it's not at the top of the list or even in the top 5. Honestly I'm fine with paying doctors (and nurses) relatively high salaries if it correlates to high quality of care and there is some evidence to suggest it does. I'd rather they get the money than say investment bankers or other financial leaches in our society. The worst part of the cost is that they have to hire virtual armies of non-medical support staff to handle all the scheduling, billing, paperwork, and medical records, much of which should be automated or eliminated in many cases. In my wife's office there are one or two physicians and probably 10-15 support staff on any given day. Guess where the majority of the cost lies? (it's not the doctor's salary)
The high cost of major medical operations and treatments is a result of multiple factors, but a major one is the high demand and low supply.
What do you specifically mean when you say low supply? There is no widespread shortage of supply of medical procedures to date. There are some nursing staff shortages in some markets and fewer doctors being trained than probably are needed looking forward. In most cases if people have to wait a little while (which is what happens when capacity is strained) that's not the tragedy many make it out to be for many conditions. Let's be clear too. There is a difference between cost of providing the service and the prices charged to patients. It's important to keep the distinction clear when discussing this topic. For example hospital pricing bears NO relationship whatsoever to the actual cost of providing services. (seriously, it's almost criminal) But we as patients still have to pay it and we see that pricing as the "cost" of the service when in reality we are paying a rather steep markup in many cases.
The number one driver of high costs in the US is administrative costs. A large part of this is because we have this ludicrously complicated and hodge-podge payment system and shitty medical records systems and scattered insurance system. We (stupidly) don't have the government playing a big role in negotiating prices like every other civilized country. Other important factors are high drug costs, defensive medicine (extra tests/procedures to avoid liability), over use of expensive treatment modalities, wages/staffing, specialization/referrals, and believe it or not branding.
If the barrier to opening and successfully suing both professionals and hospitals over undesirable
medical outcomes was much higher, then the costs of legal insurance, and the costs of many services
could have been much lower;
My wife is a doctor and I think you overestimate the cost of insurance. Sure it's a problem, particularly in some specialties like OB/GYN and pediatrics. But the amount my wife's practice has to pay for insurance is not as outrageous as you probably think it is. I've seen the numbers and I honestly expected them to be a lot worse. The bigger problem here is that doctors literally have to order tests just to be sure in case of a lawsuit. Usually it's not a thing but on the rare cases where it does come to a lawsuit the first thing any lawyer worth his diploma is going to ask is "why didn't you order this extra test" or "why didn't you consult another specialist". And so the doctors do what they have to do. Ask yourself what you would do it you could be personally sued for malpractice if you didn't have that extra design review for your code?
To be fair, bear in mind that there is also a cost to shielding doctors excessively fr
Very very generous indeed of the donors, although I have to wonder:
- Any plans for the recipients to be encouraged to pay this back?
- Will, or should, they ban DNFs from this program? (I've always had mixed feelings about the flood of foreigners coming into our educational systems, whether they plan to practice here or return home.)
(DNFs = "Dirty Nasty Foreigners", a running joke on one of my favorite forums, which incidentally is full of DNFs who find it funny)
If NYU thinks that new docs are being "pushed" into the top-paying specialties by debt, they are going to be sorely disappointed. I rather proffer that the new docs are being PULLED by higher pay into those specialties.
These days, a large fraction of students go to med school not because they are altruists, but because they are capitalists.
At the same time, the health care system is evolving where non-specialists (PCPs) hardly do anything at all. Just write some routine scripts, and tell people to get rest when they have a cold. Otherwise, refer to a specialist.
This sounds all well and good, but how big is the class? Typical medical schools only have around 100 admissions per calendar year. $60K/year x 100 isn't that much to a large institution...
With thousands of applications, these limited class sizes artificially keep the number of doctors low. How about doubling your class size, and decreasing the cost? Doctors could start out with less debt, and could maybe afford to deal with the miniscule reimbursement rates for primary care?
Throw in universal income and NY will be more broke than CA!
Wonder who or what is their money fairy. With it being free I bet the test to be admitted will be a very tough one. One that's very subjective and probably politically correct.
I noticed that they mentioned that room & board is not included. Maybe that's where they get you? Education is free, Room & board will run you $500,000 for the 6 years.